turned on the hot water in the shower, and watched the bathroom mirror steam over as she undressed and hung her pungent stable clothes on the back of the door. Stepping in, she wondered first why the last song she heard on the radio was always the one that stuck in her head. She had a theory that a woman could always tell what a guy had on his mind by knowing the words to the tune he was humming. Guys’ subconscious minds just worked that way. She regarded this as one of the best kept secrets women had; if men were aware women knew this, they would be more guarded about singing in the shower.
Her thoughts changed back to Paula, whose life seemed to have tanked. Anna feared Paula might actually do herself in, just from the e-mail she had sent. Husband in car sales with GM and the Big Three going south, one daughter pregnant at fifteen and the other one having joined a cult and changed her name, bankruptcy looming in the wake of the housing mortgage crisis . . . Paula’s list got grittier. But she was saved, Anna thought.
Out of the shower, she toweled off her toned and muscular body as she moved about the apartment. Cold Play cleared her head of Elton John, and she went over to the window to flush the room with spring air. Purple crocuses up next to the brick building across the street caught her eye. The cat came to sit on the window sill and began chittering at some cawing crows.
“You talkin’ kitty? Whatcha doin? Git those crows! Git those crows!”
She sometimes thought that if she didn’t have the cat to talk to, she might go off the deep end from loneliness. Just then the phone rang, and she picked up to hear a rich male voice in an accent she didn’t recognize.
“Miss Washington?”
“Yes?”
“This is Nir Tetzlah calling from the Ein Gedi school for Experiential Education.”
“The which? Um, where are you calling from?”
“Israel, Miss Washington, near Jerusalem. Ein Gedi is an oasis plateau in the Judean desert. Very beautiful.”
“Ah! Sounds lovely. You must have heard of me from my website.” The man’s Israeli accent made sense now.
“Yes, I have been looking for organizations like yours . . .”
“Well, I’m not exactly an organization, more like a consultant . . .”
“Yes, yes, that’s fine, I understand. But what I am getting at is that we have a school here, an outdoor school, much like your Outward Bound or your National Outdoor Leadership School—only much smaller, of course—and we need both a ropes element course and also a climbing site set up. We think we have found the area we want to use, and although it might be a little . . . um, argued? over . . .”
“Contested?” she interjected.
“. . . we need someone to plan it out and make it safe for our students to use within the safety standards of our organization.”
“Well, yes, that’s what I do. But you understand—my rates are higher than some out there . . .”
“Yes, yes, you shall not worry about that. We have several benefactors who want to see this come into being, and your reputation for precision in the inspection process is very good.”
Sounds all right, thought Anna.
“Well, I can’t say I speak much Hebrew, although I usually do a crash course before any foreign engagements. When do you want this plotted out? What kind of access does the public have to the area?” she added as an afterthought.
“This is all still under negotiation. The area we are discussing is the Gai ben Hinom valley just outside of the Old City . . . have you been to Israel ever?”
“No. But, uh, I read about it in the news all the time?” she offered.
“Yes, well. We do have that dubious distinction of being a news-making nation. We were thinking not until September or October.”
“You know, I have to leave the house right now, but that’s a distinct possibility. How can I get back in touch with you?”
Tetzlah gave her the contact number and reminded her of the time difference between Madison and Israel.
She hung up, considering the intriguing proposal. Just then the cat jumped down and started caterwauling, crouching low, as it half crawled, half scooted under the bed. Another tremor was starting—there had been a few lately, only 2–3 on the Richter scale, so slight they were barely noticeable. But the first time it had happened Anna and Jonathan had been in bed, each thinking the other was jiggling a foot. Then Anna noticed the ceiling fan shaking mildly, and said, “Is that you?” “No, I thought it was you,” he had replied.
So Anna had called in to the police department. Cold and precise, protecting the peace, they simply ascertained if she had suffered any property damage. When she had said no, they did divulge that several people had called in, and that she should not worry—so long as she hadn’t suffered any loss. The whole thing was peculiar, because Wisconsin was not exactly in a fault zone for earthquakes.
Anna looked up at the hanging light in the kitchen as it shook slightly this time. Global warming certainly was having odd and widespread effects.
After she’d run her calloused hands over the cat’s soft fur several times, Anna grabbed a cinnamon raisin bagel and gathered up her pack of climbing gear, alarmed the apartment, and took the stairs down two at a time. As she threw the climbing gear into the front passenger seat of the rattletrap Nissan, she groped for her cell phone in her shirt pocket so she could tell Jonathan about this most recent offer for work. She could already see his pursed lips and feel the weight of his silence. He had been trying to persuade her to let go of the out-of-state and overseas work, which took her away for longer than he wanted her to be gone.
“I have a geriatric car, a geriatric laptop, and a geriatric cell phone,” she muttered, as she fished out the phone, which had no photo ability and whose owner had no texting ability. “The least they could do is make a fake dial tone,” she groused.
For as often as she hated seeing other people using their cell phones when she righteously thought they should be focusing on their driving, she pulled away from the curb, punched in Jonathon’s number, and waited for his answer.
“Hey, luv, what’s up?” Her heart twinged when she heard his resonant voice, which sounded like it came from old oak caskets that had stored bourbon and been buried under a sunken vessel deep in the ocean.
“Hi! Just finished at the barn, and I’m on my way to the rock gym. Salvatore put up some new routes. Gotta check ’em out.”
“Can you call me later in the afternoon?”
“Sounds good. Then I’ll tell you about the new offer I just got in today. Pretty exciting, exotic—dangerous, even,” she dangled for him.
“Okay sweetie—hold it till later this afternoon. I’ve got an incoming call.”
As they hung up, Anna reflected on how much simpler life was before cell phones, and how much more in touch people had been. Cell phones certainly were useful in a number of ways, but people seemed to turn to obsessively calling one another even in a paradoxically arid landscape of personal contact. Cell phones had to be one of the most ironic technologies for communication in the twentieth century.
Dodging
